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Meta quietly cut roughly 600 jobs inside its Superintelligence Labs this week, a blunt reminder that even the Silicon Valley giants are not immune to the consequences of hubris and mismanagement. The layoffs hit the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research unit and teams focused on AI product and infrastructure, while the prized TBD Lab — the elite group building the next-generation models — was left untouched.
The company’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, framed the move as a push for “fewer conversations” and leaner teams, and the memo urged affected employees to apply for other roles inside Meta as they were told their status. Workers were reportedly put into a non-working notice period with access revoked and given a termination date in late November unless they found internal matches, showing how the corporate playbook favors optics over long-term loyalty.
This isn’t an isolated personnel shuffle — it’s the predictable fallout of reckless spending and top-down mandates from the Zuckerberg era, after a desperate hiring binge to bulk up a showpiece AI division. Meta has been reshuffling money and muscle with blockbuster financing and acquisitions meant to jump-start its superintelligence dreams, while ordinary engineers and researchers get shown the door when projects don’t bend to executive whim.
Hardworking Americans who build useful products ought to be outraged that talent is treated like a fungible line item in someone else’s prestige project. Reports say impacted employees will receive severance packages and that Meta is encouraging internal transfers, but severance does not replace stability, careers, or the trust burned when a company pivots overnight.
This episode also exposes a deeper problem: concentrated power and centralized planning inside Big Tech inevitably breed overreach, wasted capital, and chaotic personnel decisions when reality fails to match the boardroom narrative. Meta’s open-source Llama rollout and subsequent reorganizations were met with mixed returns, and instead of admitting mistakes the company tightened ranks and doubled down on the shiny lab everyone brags about.
Americans deserve companies that are accountable to customers and workers, not to Silicon Valley prestige or endless grandiose AI fantasies. Lawmakers and regulators should stop pretending layoffs are just internal housekeeping and should ask hard questions about where investor dollars and human talent are being banked — and demand that Big Tech stop treating innovation like an endless vanity project.
